Honorable

It is possible that I will need to upgrade a laptop by replacing the existing HDD with an SSD and I initially thought that I would need to re-install W10, all the existing software and settings.

However, I have seen that there is software around that will allow me to clone from one drive to another and this would make life a lot easier. The laptop is only used lightly and ALL the data currently on the HDD will fit on an SSD.

Not sure if there are enough slots in laptop to have both installed at same time - will need to check that!

Anyway, my question is whether the cloning software will leave me with an identical system I.e. will it move all the software, settings, favourites, browser bookmarks, desktop, etc. or will I still need to tweak it afterwards?

Also, anybody got any recommendations of cloning software to use/avoid?

Admirable

most cloning software creates an exact copy of the drive's partitions and data.

if you cannot have both drives attached to the laptop, remove the existing and complete the cloning from another system that has multiple available SATA ports. or even purchase an external drive dock that has cloning features. this way you could even use the original HDD for external storage, etc after the change is complete.

EaseUS has some nice disk control softwares available. i believe Clone Disk is free.
Samsung and a lot of other disk manufacturers will also offer their own cloning software to use for free.

Respectable

Distinguished

FYI - I've used EaseUS products to clone and recover several hard drives. It's pretty good software. Another freebie is AOMEI Backupper. It will also clone drives. I use it for my home network as it's one of the few that will allow me to backup to my NAS.

Honorable

I'm sure you're right, USAFRet. When I tried cloning from an internal HDD to an external SSD, it copied everything except the boot data, and I read that was the way it works. That was a year or two ago. I imagine you could make a full system backup from the HDD and later restore to the SSD, but I haven't tried that.
I'll just add that I've had good experience with the free Easeus Todo Backup and the free Easeus Partition Master, but I've never cloned with an Easeus product.

Respectable

I've used EaseUS todo to clone an internal drive to external drive and it worked well; the only issue I had cloning to ah external ssd with my Thinkpad x230. While it worked with my desktop with a normal clone, I had to use the sector by sector option to get a good clone, that was not corrupt and would boot properly.

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